Friday, 18 October 2013

A True "True West" by Phillip Breen

Director Phillip Breen has been telling us about how he prepares for a production like True West. In this first post, Phillip explains the importance of considering the time when the play was written, and what's going on in the world today.

Austin:
Now that's a real story. True to life.

On
the surface of things nothing much happens in True West. Two brothers meet in
their mum's house 40 miles east of Los Angeles. One is a relatively successful
writer, one's a drifter and petty criminal who has spent (conservatively) three
months wandering in the Mojave desert.

The
characters, such as they are, are contradictory, they might not even be real,
the story, such as it is, makes little sense, there's no real beginning, middle
or end, no-one appears to learn anything. And the whole thing feels like a mad
dream.

Phillip Breen in rehearsals. Photo by Tim Morozzo.

But
it is one of the best plays I have ever read.

How
is this the case?

What
has obsessed actors, directors and designers about this play? How does one go
about starting to make a production of this astonishing play?

I
start from a feeling in the pit of my stomach, that this play is astonishing
because it’s true.
True to life.

Plays reveal things about ourselves
that are difficult to express in any other way; revealing fears, dreams,
anxieties about the writer and the writer's first audience. So to make a play
live in 2013 I try to understand as much as I can of the culture that
surrounded the play and that gave birth to it in order to translate it to now. Some
of you will recall my production of The Shadow of A Gunman by Sean
O'Casey - the setting for this was an Imperial power on its last legs, trapped
in an unwinnable war, a place where young men leapt out of doorways to murder
soldiers, and those soldiers met these acts of "terrorism" with
savage reprisals, which inspired more desperate young men to kill. The story
was set in Ireland in 1921, but one can see how this became a play about the
2003 invasion of Iraq, and the psychology of occupation.

There are three things that I try and
get my head around when I start work on a play. Those things form a little
triangle, and if those three things are working hand in hand in your thinking
then you have a chance of giving a full and rounded account of a classic play
and recreating its meaning and its shock for a contemporary audience.

1) The time in which the play was
written - what was going on in the world when the play was being written.
What was the writer reacting against? What made the play shocking to an (in the
case of True West) a 1980 audience? What did the first audience think they were
going to see? What did people think was going to happen? So many of the plays
of the mid-20th century are written under the shadow of the atomic bomb and the
very real possibility of a nuclear holocaust.

2) What was going on in the
writer’s personal life? - Why did this writer need to write this play
at this point in history? Which artists did he admire? Paul McCartney wanted to
be Buddy Holly for example. What personal experiences did he bring to bear on
the writing of this play? How does it relate to other of his works?

3) What's going on now? - Why
is this play relevant now? Why should we do it now? What's it got to say to a
Scottish audience in 2013? What expectations are contemporary audiences going
to bring to the play? How do we translate some things implicit in the play that
might be difficult to understand for a modern audience?

True West was written
by Sam Shepard in 1980. That year America was going through an identity crisis: defeat in Vietnam, the impeachment of Nixon after the Watergate scandal and a
decline in American industrial power. The promise and optimism of post-war
America had given way to cynicism and pessimism about the future. The Cold war
was still at its height, the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and there
was an ongoing hostage crisis in Iran (detailed in Ben Affleck’s 2012 film Argo)
where several American diplomats were held hostage in Tehran by revolutionary
students.

Sam Shepard

It seemed somehow
appropriate that in 1980, America turned to a President who used to pretend to
be a cowboy for a living (he even referred to the job as "the role of a
lifetime"). This President [Ronald Reagan] self-consciously used the image
of the Wild West in his election campaign in an attempt to restore America's
optimism and its self-confidence. For many Americans it worked, but for others
the gap between the mythology of the old west and the reality it was enlisted
to represent had never been greater.

To artists
such as Sam Shepard, by 1980, the gap between the myth and the 'reality' of
America was a subject of profound importance.

In the next post, we’ll explore 1980,
America’s relationship with the Western, and its influence on the play.

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Internationally reputed for its repertoire the Citizens Theatre presents a mixture of contemporary versions of classic plays and new Scottish drama. We work with writers, directors and companies that have a reputation for producing outstanding work to deliver truly inspirational live theatre.

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